When Warhol made his oft-quoted prediction, he was referring to the ability of media to push anyone into the bright glare of the spotlight for a fleeting brush with celebrity. What he couldn’t have anticipated was the strange twist the web would throw on that. The web democratized media and accelerated Warhol’s prediction. Viral fame doesn’t depend on tightly controlled channels like newspapers and TV networks, it seeps, oozes and sometimes gushes, propelled by users. All of us, including middle aged guys from New Jersey lip syncing to pop songs, kung fu fighting bears and teen age Star Wars obsessed wannabes, can now be famous.

But it’s not just the opportunities for fame that have undergone drastic web-modification. It’s also the ways we measure fame. Humans are obsessed with status. We are mesmerized by social rankings, and thanks to the infinitely measurable nature of the web, we have a legion of new status metrics available to see how we stack up against the world at large. And I’m just as big a sucker for this as everyone else. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I regularly check my status on various web based metrics. Here are a few of them.

Googling One’s Self

I think everyone’s guilty of this one at one time or another. You check to see what ranks for your name, who else of the same name shows up (my doppelganger is a photographer and musician in Scotland), and how many mentions Google finds of you out in the web wilderness (22,900). As your digital fame grows, you broaden your search parameters. For example, do you break the top 10 for just your last name? This is admittedly dependent on how common your name is. Hotchkiss is not a household word, but I am competing with a prep school in Connecticut, a town in Colorado, a civil war cartographer, a precursor to the Jeep, the owner of the Calgary Flames and a Ballroom Dancing instructor. Or how about your first name? Gordon Lightfoot, a video game storeowner and a comic book about ultra bondage offer stiff competition for “Gord”.

Here’s a new variation: Search Suggestion Wheel of Fortune. With the search suggestions feature now available on all the major engines, see how many letters you have to type in for your name before you appear on the list of suggested searches. I come up in 5 letters (on Google.com. My home country is a little less kind. I need to go to 7 letters on Google.ca).

Techno-Rate-i

If you’ve joined the blogosphere, a number of destinations offer updated stats on how you stack up against the Seth Godin’s, Guy Kawasaki’s, Michael Arrington’s and Arianna Huffington’s of the world. I have been tremendously delinquent here. I was once in the top 100,000 on Technorati, but have slipped back to the lowly 200,000’s due mainly to posting neglect. Still, with somewhere over 100 million blogs in existence (exact numbers seem hard to find) that still puts me in the top 0.2 percent, so my ego can live with that.

Twitterholics

The newest addiction for those seeking digital attention is Twitter. Now that the celebrities have glommed onto Tweeting (come on Kutcher, DeGeneres and Spears, can’t you share a little love?), it’s not as easy to gain top Tweet status, but Twitterholics can get their fix of ranking reporting at Twitterholic. I do better here than on Technorati, once again breaking top 100,000 status. 1,649, 378 more followers and I beat Oprah (@outofmygord if you care).

Fame is Fleeting

In the new wired world, we are constantly reminded of our own notoriety, or lack of same, compared to everyone else in the world. In the pre-web world, not only were we not famous, we were also blissfully ignorant of the fact. Today, it seems that everyone should strive to have some small sliver of fame. Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t about what’s parked in your driveway, it’s how many hits your blog gets. Social status is now measured in backlinks, hits and followers. My brother-in-law dealt my ego a devastating blow when he gave me a t-shirt that said “More people have read this t-shirt than my blog”. But I’ll get even. He won’t be getting any link love in this column.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider July 2nd, 2009

It has been a little over five years since we at Enquiro, released our first white paper, Inside the Mind of the Searcher. The paper has been recognized as ground breaking research by many industry experts, including Danny Sullivan Search Engine Land and Anne Holland, founder of MarketingSherpa. The 30 page report discovered some startling findings about the way consumers search.

Some of the items that we concluded from our research was that it became clear that searchers have mentally divided the search engine results page into distinct sections, and many searchers will skip some of these sections completely. In general, organic listings are more likely to be seen by a greater percentage of users than sponsored listings. It also emerged that many Google users have become preconditioned to visually ignore sponsored listings on the page. While this may have changed slightly in the past five years as searchers become more savvy, these habits still hold true for many. In fact, when looking at the search results page, most users look for a number of specific items, at least one of which must be present to capture a click through. These items include the key phrase in the title or description, product information and trusted brand names and vendors. This appears to hold true for both digital natives and digital immigrants.

Download Inside the Mind of the Searcher

Organic vs. Paid

One of the things that I remember most about this white paper was the fact that in observing how users interacted with the search results pages, we noticed distinct trends. Almost 80% initially skipped over all sponsored listings and went straight to the top organic results. In most cases, their eyes never came back to the sponsored listings. We also found that the search process was a circular one, not necessarily a linear process. A typical search is a circular and complex process, with multiple interactions with sites and search engine results pages.

I happen to specialize in Organic Search. So in essence my job is to help my clients gain visibility in the natural (organic) listings of the search results pages. Over the years, I have been very successful with this. I can appreciate that organic results still generate the majority of clicks. In 2009, five years after our original study, industry folks predict that 70-75% of clicks are organic with 20-25% being sponsored. Yet we still see the majority of search budgets being given to sponsored, which I can also appreciate as organic and sponsored do in fact need to work together for ultimate online success. However, it is worth mentioning the fact that the need for organic search should not be overlooked. The companies that “get it” know and understand this, and they continue to realize the importance of SEO/organic search. They also understand the importance of social marketing and the need to continue to reinvent their brands.

Inside the Mind of the Searcher 2009

In the five years since the release if “Inside the Mind of the Searcher”, we have seen some tremendous shifts in online marketing and in marketing in general. We have also seen some changes with the Search Engines and with the results they return. In 2004, there was no Universal or Blended Search. There were no images or videos or blogs or news articles being mixed in with the 10 blue links that we were accustomed to seeing. Sounds like we need to again delve deep into the mind of the searcher and see how they have changed with their digital habits in 2009 and going into the next decade. It will be interesting to see how searchers:

* Interact with a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft (Bing) SERP now vs. in 2004
* Respond to blended results – Are there preferences for news results over videos?
* Do males and females react differently to Blended Search?
* How do keyword queries change along the buying funnel?
* How has social impacted the mind of the searcher?
* How has the interaction between organic and sponsored listing on a SERP changed?

Capturing the Click

In our original paper we discussed what captured the click. Relevancy is the key here and still holds true today. SEO 101 is important as optimized titles and descriptions were identified as top items that helped entice users to click a given result over another.

If searchers were looking for a site to make a purchase from, the importance of what appeared in the title and listing text changed a little. (Listed in order of importance):

* The exact query in the Title and Description
* Offer product information: features, comparisons, reviews and prices
* Trusted brand names and vendors
* Promises of added value: discounts, free shipping, etc
* Ability to buy online
* Trusted URL’s

Maybe some things just never change, but it sounds to me like we need to perform some updated research and examine the mind of the Searcher five years later. I can see it now, Inside the Mind of the Searcher 2010. Oh and for the record, Enquiro was using Zappos examples (see page 25 of the white paper) even back in 2004 before it was fashionable to do so.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Learning to crochet.”

“On the computer?”

“Yes, there’s a video showing how on YouTube.”

“Really?”

“Yes Dad, YouTube has now replaced Grandma” (smart mouth on that kid…not sure where she gets it from)

Adapting with our Plastic Brains

Prensky and Small have written extensively on how exposure to technology can literally change the way our brains are wired. Our brains are remarkably malleable in nature, continually changing to adapt to our environment. The impressive label for it is “neuroplasticity” but we know it better simply as “learning”. We now know that our brains continually adapt throughout our lives. But there are two phases where the brain literally reforms itself in a massive restructuring: right around 2 years of age and again as teenagers. During these two periods, billions of new synaptic connections are formed, and billions are also “pruned” out of the way. All this happens as a direct response to our environments, helping us develop the capabilities to deal with the world.

These two spurts of neuroplasticity are essential development stages, but what happens when there is a rapid and dramatic shifts in our environment from one generation to the next? What happens when our children’s brains develop to handle something we never had to deal with as children? Quite literally, their brains function differently than ours. This becomes particularly significant when the rate of adoption is very rapid, making a technology ubiquitous in a generation or less. The other factor is how much the technology becomes part of our daily lives. The more important it is, the more significant the generational divide.

Our Lives: As Seen on TV

The last adoption that met both conditions was the advent of television. There, 1960 to 1965 marked the divide where the first generation to be raised on television started to come of age. And the result was a massive social shift. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, shows example after example of how our society took a U turn in the 60’s, reversing a trend in building social capital. We became more aware and ideologically tolerant, but we also spent less time with each other. This trend played out in everything for volunteering and voting to having dinner parties and joining bowling leagues. The single biggest cause identified by Putnam? Television. We are only now beginning to assess the impact of this technology on our society, a half-century after it’s introduction. It took that long for the ripples to be felt through the generations.

You Ain’t Seen Nuthin Yet…

That’s a sobering thought when we consider what’s happening today. The adoption rate of the Internet has been similar to that of television, but the impact on our daily lives is even more significant. Everything we touch now is different than it was when we were growing up. If TV caused a seismic shift of such proportions that it took us 50 years to catalog the fall out, what will happen 50 years from now?

Who will be teaching my great grandchildren how to crochet?

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider June 25th, 2009

I do happen to work with some of the world’s most well known brands which happen to have large commerce sites.  As a result, I evaluate their competition’s web presence as well.  In 2009, I am amazed to see just how much fundamental organic optimization these large e-commerce sites lack.  Even worse is the fact that some (many?) in the Search industry also overlook the fundamentals of SEO.  So while this may be a refresher for many of you, I do know that there are some out there who will find the following SEO reminders useful.

SEO Reminders for e-Commerce Sites

1. Site Architecture is important for SEO success - guess what?  If you cannot map out a search friendly architecture and layout of your site, you are simply not going to do well in the search results of the engines.  Some key points to remember:
    
   • Structure your site in a logical manner
   • Avoid burying important content 4 or more folders deep in the hierarchy
   • Create search engine friendly URLs 
   • Use canonical URLs
   • Use the canonical tag to address duplicate content concerns
   • Keep it clean!
      

      

2. Create Unique Content on your Product Pages - add to the vendor supplied product description copy that you are given.  Every other site that sells the same product will also feature this content.  The engines are looking to index useful, informative and unique content.  Help them out by continuing to publish fresh and informative content.  You will also receive the benefits of link value from other site and blogs that link to this content.
    
    
3. Use an SEO friendly CMS (Content Management System) - ensure that your CMS system allows you to populate unique title and meta tags and that you are able to add content as required.
    
    
4. Avoid Using Java Script in Navigation - while the engines are getting better at reading JS, they are still not there just yet.  Make sure that the search engines can follow your links and avoid placing your main navigation (top nav, side nav, footer nav) in JS.  Consider using CSS and include files as a way to create your site navigation.  Again this is just SEO 101 best practice type of stuff.
    
    
5. Create and Update Your HTML Sitemaps – as you push out new content to the web make sure that you add it to your HTML sitemap
    
    
6. Create and Update XML Sitemaps – e-commerce sites tend to be very large.  One way to ensure that your content is being crawled and indexed efficiently is to create and submit XML sitemaps.  Using these sitemaps you can actually set the priority of which pages you consider to be the most important as related to other pages on your site.  Communicate this to the search engines to ensure efficient indexing of your site.
    
7. Avoid hiding your content from the search engines – things like Flash, JS and frames might be useful from a design perspective but really they can wreak havoc from an SEO perspective.  Help the engines find your content and make it easier for them to crawl and index. 

 I understand that to some of you this may be elementary SEO, but why oh why are so many sites neglecting these fundamental practices.  If you are an e-commerce site and are currently having difficulty in gaining visibility in the major search engines, start with the basics.  Trust me, if you have failed to address the fundamentals you will be limited in your ability to place well in the results.  The longer your wait to address these issues the harder it is to overcome them.  In case you have not yet noticed the Web is a hyper-competitive environment.  Failure to address the fundamentals can most definitely have an impact on the bottom line that you generate from your online marketing efforts.  Why restrict yourself?  The need for fundamental SEO should be the first place you start when trying to optimize your web properties. 

One great B2B content development strategy can be publishing transcripts of webinars, podcasts or conference calls. These transcripts can easily run into thousands of words, and pagination can be a good choice for readability, however it quickly becomes a duplicate content issue. One client recently had a webinar transcribed which ran into 14 pages. To start with, that potentially creates 14 sets of Meta Data to be written, and 14 different places where people could link. While the content is broken into pages around the themes within the webinar, it’s all around a topic which is quite niche to begin with.

This is a classic case where existing best practices would have tried to focus the authority on the first page, and attempted to reduce the duplicate potential of the other pages by using a combination of links, 301 redirects and the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Now we can use a much more straightforward solution in the canonical link tag.

In the example I mentioned before, you would implement the tag across all 14 pages. The tag has the effect of telling the search engines "this is the preferred version, and the one we like the most". It also transfers signals like PageRank to the canonical (preferred) URL. The tag would look like this:

 <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/first-page.html" />

This will help focus link juice and authority, as well as help deal with possible duplicate content issues.

Our final webinar in the series will be – in my opinion – one of the most fascinating and thought provoking.  We’re calling it The Rise of the Digital Native: B2B Buying in Flux.  Gord Hotchkiss and his panel of experts are taking a look at a very basic but fundamental question: Does age play a role in marketing?  What does Enquiro’s latest research show us about B2B buying behavior as it relates to the buyer’s demographic, and more specifically, how and when the buyer grew up?

For the first time ever in an Enquiro webinar, we’re also joined by Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin, two very big hitters in the Search Marketing industry.  They will be part of the panel along with our own Gord Hotchkiss, Ben Hanna (Business.com), Chris Golec (Demandbase), Matthias Blume (Covario) and Mark McMaster (Google). 

As an attendee of the live event, you will get to hear the discussion as it happens, plus be able to send the panel your marketing-related questions.  We will also be touching upon the highlights of the rest of the series, so if you’ve missed previous webinars, don’t miss out on this one. To top it off, one lucky attendee will win a BuyerSphere hard copy white paper package, plus a 15-minute search marketing audit with an Enquiro account manager.

The Rise of the Digital Native
Live Webinar
Wednesday, June 24  2:00pm Pacific
Register now –>

The webinar explores:

• The differences between a Digital Native and a Digital Immigrant
• Why the brain gets wired differently in Digital Natives
• How this impacts interactions with technology and the web
• What are the implications for B2B buying
• How the landscape might shift in the next decade

Panelists:
Gord Hotchkiss – President and CEO, Enquiro
Rand Fishkin – CEO and Co-Founder, SEOmoz
Danny Sullivan – Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Ben Hanna – VP Marketing, Business.com
Mark McMaster – Senior Planner of Technology/B2B Markets, Google
Chris Golec – Founder and CEO, Demandbase
Moderated by Bill Barnes, EVP Business Development, Enquiro

Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of SEOmoz, and Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land will be special guests at the wrap-up to the BuyerSphere webinar series, June 24.

Search is more than Skin Deep 

To most users, a search engine is only skin (or GUI) deep. And anyone who’s taken Wolfram for a spin has judged it based on the results they get back. In a few cases, Wolfram’s abilities are quite impressive. But that’s not what makes Wolfram|Alpha important. For that, we look to what Stephen Wolfram has done with the entire concept of interpreting and analyzing information. Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t search data, it calculates it. That’s a fundamentally important distinction. 

Unlike Bing, which is promising a revolution that barely qualifies as evolution, Stephen Wolfram knows this is the first step on a long, long road. He says so right on the home page: “Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.” 

Wolfram’s previous work with Mathematica and NKS (New Kind of Science) shatters the paradigm that every search engine is built on, semantic relationships. As revolutionary as Google’s introduction of the linking structure of the web as a relevancy factor was, it was added to a semantic foundation. PageRank is still bound by the limits of words. And words are slippery things to base an algorithm on. 

The entire problem with words is that they’re ambiguous. The word “core” has 12 different dictionary definitions. It’s very difficult to know which one of those meanings is being used in any particular circumstance. Google and every other engine is limited by its need to guess at the meaning of language, one of the most challenging cognitive tasks we encounter as humans. Potential advancements in relevancy require gathering additional signals to help interpret meanings and reduce ambiguity. Personalization is one way to do this. Hunch, Aaron’s nominee for the iPhone of Search, requires you to fill out a long and rather bizarre quiz about your personal preferences. All this is to learn more about you, making educated guesses possible. If you’re going to stick with a Semantic foundation, personalization is a great way to increase your odds for successful interpretation. 

Another way to interpret meaning is to go with the wisdom of crowds. By overlaying the social graph, you can make the assumption that the one meaning people like you are interested in is also the meaning you might be interested in. Again, not a bad educated guess. 

Knowledge as a Complex System 

But what if you could do away with the messiness of language entirely? What if you could eliminate ambiguity from the equation? That’s the big hairy audacious goal that Stephen Wolfram has set his sights on. If you look at the entire body of “systematic knowledge” you have a complex system and in any complex system, you have patterns. Patterns are abstractions that you can apply math against. In effect, knowledge becomes computable. You don’t have to interpret semantic meaning, which is intensive guesswork at best. You can deal with numbers. And unlike language, where “core” has 12 different values, the number “3” always has the same value. 

Wolfram|Alpha is not important because it provides relevant results for stocks, cities or mathematical problems. It’s important because it’s taking an entirely new approach to working with knowledge. It’s now what Wolfram|Alpha can do today. It’s what it may enable us to do tomorrow, next year and in the year 2015. 

Wolfram|Alpha could change all the rules of search. Keep your eye on it.

As I write this there’s an automated countdown clock in another browser window counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until millions of people will flood the internet in search of the perfect Facebook username.

On June 12th at 12:01 a.m.  EDT Facebook will go crazy. Everyone who was previously assigned a user name made up of random numbers (id=123456789) will be able to obtain a username similar to what LinkedIn offers. (Official announcement here)

I can now shed my previous Facebook identity (120400011) become facebook.com/chris.davies, or if that’s not available perhaps w.chris.davies to match my LinkedIn account.

They’re limiting the potential for name-squatting by preventing pages made after May 31st and profiles after June 9th from signing up for a username, so if you’re not already on Facebook, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be ableto claim usernames on, June 28. In the mean time I’ve already had questions from several clients about how they should handle this.

Best Practices:

1. Make a reasonable effort to get a good vanity URL for your pages and/or your profile. It won’t be the end of the world if you don’t lock down facebook.com/firstname-lastname. Don’t stay up all night, but if you happen to be up at 12:01 a.m., you might want to flip on your computer.
2. Your best choice is your proper name as you usually use it, with no spaces. I’m going to shoot for www.facebook.com/chrisdavies. Remember, you want to keep it short, memorable and easy to communicate, like a verbal business card.
3. For brands, go for the most commonly used form of your name. For Enquiro, that means using facebook.com/enquiro, and not the full name of our company, Enquiro Search Solutions. Don’t worry if someone’s squatted on your brand.
4. You can prevent your registered trademarks from being registered as usernames. You can do that by filling out this form.
5. Update your other social networking profiles to reflect your new-found vanity URL.

Resources:

Usernames for Facebook Pages

Username Eligibility FAQ

Info for Intellectual Property Rights Holders

I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong. Bing is a good step forward for Microsoft. It shows they’re serious about search. But unlike Aaron, I don’t think Bing is going to make a significant difference in market share numbers. I think Microsoft will get a temporary blip, causing everyone to rush to pronounce Google’s imminent death, and then everyone will go back to searching the way they did before: on Google. 

Wanted: Revolutionaries! 

Search needs an iPhone. Bing is a Razr. Bing is a repackaging of the same old experience, the same blue links. Microsoft has added some filters and additional navigation. But at the core, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. It won’t break a habit. 

Here’s the fundamental problem. Microsoft says search is broken, and Bing is the answer. If Bing is the answer, it must mean that search wasn’t really that badly broken. In fact, it must have been barely scratched. Because the Bing experience really isn’t that different than my Google experience. Bing narrowed the gap, but they didn’t jump to the other side. It seems to me that it wasn’t Search that was broken. It was Live Search that was broken. And, if we agree on that, than Bing is a pretty effective band-aid. 

What We Need is an iPhone of Search 

But what if Microsoft is right (as I suspect they are), and search is broken? What if we could have a significantly better search experience? What would it take to deliver that? It requires scrapping all preconceived notions and starting over. It requires an approach like the iPhone. 

The iPhone isn’t a mobile phone, it’s a mobile web and computing device. The phone is secondary. The iPhone is in the middle of changing the way we interact with online. We squeeze, spread, stroke, tap and shake. The iPhone also opened up an ecosystem of functionality. The App Store is the true genius of the iPhone: Little bits of integrated functionality, making our lives more fun, more productive and more connected. Apple never intended to catch up. They intended to vault over the competition, changing the rules and opening a new marketplace. Apple had nothing short of revolution on their minds. 

What Bing has done is heated up the Search race again, and that might be the best thing that comes out of this. The amount of ink generated already shows that we all want a more competitive search space. Google has had it relatively easy for a long time. 

Catching the Wave 

Ironically, the most exciting thing I saw last week got lost amongst all the buzz about Bing. Google’s Wave does for email what I am proposing for search; it takes the current status quo and completely shatters it. Wave maybe an integral piece in a new, richer world of online functionality, delivered to you through the Chrome Browser. Google is slowly assembling a critical mass of SaaS applications that threatens to change our concept of how we do things digitally. As those pieces come together, count on search to be at the core of it. 

If I were Microsoft, that’s what would be keeping me up at night. Their empire was built on a foundation that’s over 20 years old: the concept of desktop applications. They have struggled to move into the new world of SaaS. But Google seems to be getting it and building a new world order around it. Now, that’s a revolutionary concept.

 Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider June 4th, 2009